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Sunday, March 27, 2016

2015 GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT: DEPTH, BREADTH AND SHARED PROSPERITY. 3/28, 8:30am-1:00pm. Sponsors: George Washington University (GWU); World Bank. Speakers: Philip Schellekens, Lead Author and Manager of the Global Monitoring Report, World Bank; Stephen C. Smith, Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU; Francisco Ferreira, Senior Advisor, Development Research Group, World Bank; Sabina Alkire, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, GWU; Joao Pedro Azevedo, Lead Economist, Poverty and Equity, World Bank; Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva, Co-Director of the World Development Report 2017; Danny Leipziger, Professor of International Business, GWU; James Foster, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, GWU.

CHINA'S “BELT AND ROAD” INITIATIVE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT. 3/28, 2:00-3:30pm. Sponsor: CSIS. Speakers: Ziad Haider, Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs, Bureau of Economics and Business Affairs, U.S. Department of State; John Hurley, Director, International Debt and Development Policy, U.S. Department of the Treasury; Olin Wethington, Chairman and Principal, Wethington International LLC; Christopher Johnson; Senior Advisor and Chair in China Studies, CSIS.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

The Japanese government’s track record on respecting civil liberties and the rule of law is suspect, as I detailed in last week’s Counterpoint.

In 2002, the former Defense Agency, which is now a full-fledged ministry, spied on people who filed information disclosure requests, while the police and courts railroaded antiwar protesters on dubious charges of trespassing after they passed out flyers encouraging members of the Self-Defense Forces to oppose deployment in Iraq as war raged there in 2004.

These weren’t the only cases. A Buddhist priest was also apprehended while passing out antiwar flyers (imagine that, a peace-loving monk!), and the police kept a tail on one civil servant so they could catch him distributing copies of the Communist Party newspaper — arresting him even though it was on his day off. Don’t the cops have anything better to do than harass ordinary citizens exercising their constitutional rights? Is this how they pretend to keep the nation safe from terrorists?

In any society governed by the rule of law, it is essential to protect civil liberties by applying reasonable limits to police surveillance powers. In battling terrorism, such limits are portrayed by critics as handcuffing the police and other security agencies and thus endangering public safety. Unlike despotic societies defined by tyranny and the denial of human rights, however, democracies depend on ensuring that civil liberties are not trampled and human rights are respected. Debating the balance between an individual’s privacy and the state’s desire to pry strengthens a democracy and the rule of law — but this is a project that is never fully realized and depends on constant vigilance and an ongoing commitment.

As Japan wades ever further into the “war on terror,” it is important to ask what protections should be accorded to ethnic and religious minorities. It is evident that the police have zeroed in on Japan’s tiny Muslim community, seeing it as a potential hotbed of terrorism. But can this profiling of an entire community based on religious belief be justified? Is it not a violation of fundamental rights such as freedom of religion and privacy? Are such discriminatory practices consistent with democratic norms?

The it-can’t-be-helped school of thought asserts that terrorists don’t abide by any rules, so democratic societies are vulnerable and therefore sometimes need to curtail civil liberties and discriminate for the greater good.

Germany, however, has found that such blunt instruments are ineffective. According to a report by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, a German profiling program known as Rasterfahndung gathered information on 32,000 Muslim residents in Germany, but failed to identify any suspected terrorists.

There are an estimated 100,000 Muslims in Japan and it has been reported that the government has compiled dossiers on 70,000 of them. It has so far failed to identify a single terrorist, but has succeeded in indiscriminately invading privacy. The courts have sided with the police, affirming their right to conduct surveillance based on profiling alone without an iota of evidence suggesting criminal activities or terrorist inclinations.

Back in 2010 there was a leak of documents from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department that revealed just how intrusive this surveillance is, prompting a lawsuit that accused the police of violating constitutional rights to privacy and religion, and protections against discrimination. In 2014 the court awarded token damages for the leak of personal information, but dismissed the constitutional claims and held that the police surveillance was necessary and inevitable. This means it is open season for the police to collect personal information and conduct surveillance of designated groups of people based on ethnicity or religion, absent any concrete evidence justifying intrusions of their privacy and human rights.

So, with judicial backing, the police can take the picture of everyone who enters a mosque in Japan and intercept the communications of any resident solely based on the individual’s faith. As Japan boosts tourism in the run-up to the 2020 Olympics it is attracting many Muslim tourists, but are they all being tracked as potential terrorists? Can customers of halal restaurants expect special scrutiny? That’s a sinister twist on the welcoming spirit of omotenashi.

You only need to look at South Korea for an example of a nation struggling to prevent the wholesale expansion of police powers under the pretext of cracking down on terrorism. President Park Geun-hye’s ruling Saenuri Party is pushing through an antiterrorism bill that would give her country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) sweeping new powers that are “justified” by the “security emergency” associated with North Korea’s recent nuclear test — despite a lack of concrete evidence that shows Pyongyang is preparing terrorist attacks on South Korea.

There are concerns that the law would primarily serve to repress internal dissent in line with Park’s efforts to tame the press and intimidate critics, including educators. Opposition parties tried to block the new law by mounting a record-breaking filibuster because there is no pressing need to expand the extensive snooping powers the NIS — an organization indelibly associated with terrible excesses under a succession of authoritarian governments — already enjoys.

Moreover, the NIS has been implicated in a dirty tricks campaign that helped Park win elections in 2012 by a slim margin, and oversight mechanisms remain feeble. One can understand why security agencies seek indiscriminate authority to collect intelligence, tap wires, conduct investigations, track financial transactions, delete online posts and impose travel bans — that is the nature of the beast. But giving them a blank check is perilous to civil liberties and constitutional rights. Rather than unleashing the NIS, it needs to be reformed and subject to more extensive monitoring to prevent abuses. As Japan ratchets up its counterterrorism capabilities, the NIS provides a worrying example.

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi has gained notoriety for her comments warning that the government could suspend broadcasting rights if programs are deemed “politically biased. “Problematically, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s idea of bias seems to be defined as criticism of its policies — an essential element of democratic societies. So it’s not enough that media firms have ousted several newscasters critical of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policies, or that they have hired relatives of Abe (a nephew at Fuji TV) and Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso (a nephew at TBS), now they are being warned that in the coming battle over revising the Constitution, the government is taking off the gloves.

These developments are having a chilling effect on freedom of the press and expression in Japan, and raise real concerns about expanding police powers under the guise of counterterrorism. Attempts to muzzle the media while subverting the public’s right to know through the new state secrets law imperils democratic freedoms and highlights the need to strike a virtuous balance between ramped-up counterterrorism, civil liberties and accountability.

On 16 February, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida signed a ‘Strategy for Co-operation in the Pacific’, in which both countries emphasised their shared values of ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.

As they were doing so, Japanese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Shinsuke Sugiyama was in Geneva addressing a meeting of the UN committee which oversees the implementation of one of the world’s key human rights accords: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). On the agenda was the Japanese government’s treatment of the problems of memory, justice and redress arising from the imperial military’s mass recruitment of women (the so-called ‘comfort women’) to military brothels during the Pacific War.

It was a great opportunity for the Abe administration to follow up its 28 December 2015 joint statement with South Korea on ‘comfort women’. In the December statement Foreign Minister Kishida acknowledged ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’ and passed on Prime Minister Abe’s ‘sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women’.

The December statement committed the Japanese government to contributing to a fund to assist surviving South Korean former ‘comfort women’, but its rather curious wording left some observers unsure just what Japan had apologised for.

Since coming to power the Abe administration has told the world that it is continuing to uphold — or (in the Japanese version) to ‘inherit’ (keisho suru) — the 1993 Kono Declaration. In that declaration, issued after an extensive study by the Japanese government, Japan acknowledged that ‘in many cases [‘comfort women’] were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments’. The Japanese government also promised to ‘face squarely the historical facts as described above instead of evading them, and take them to heart as lessons of history’.

If the Abe administration has indeed ‘inherited’ the Kono Declaration, one would assume that Abe’s December ‘sincere apologies and remorse’ were apologising for the historical fact that many ‘comfort women’ were recruited and held against their will, and a reaffirmation of Japan’s determination to take the lessons of history to heart.

But oddly, neither Abe nor any of his ministers or spokespeople has ever been heard to echo the key words of the Kono Declaration. Instead, when challenged on the question of state responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ issue, they repeatedly respond with a formula developed during the first Abe administration of 2006–2007: ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’.

This statement is extremely significant. It treats official Japanese government and military documents (the most incriminating of which were deliberately burnt in the closing days of the war) as the only reliable source of information on the topic. It entirely discounts the testimony of surviving former ‘comfort women’. This includes testimony collected and taken into account by the Japanese government at the time of the Kono Declaration. By implication, this formula says to the survivors that their testimony is at best unreliable evidence and at worst lies.

So the key question about the 28 December deal was this: when Foreign Minister Kishida referred to ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’, was he speaking about the involvement of the military in recruiting, transporting and holding women against their will? Was he upholding the promises of the Kono Declaration? If so, then the December accord was indeed a major step forward in Japan–South Korea relations. If not, it starts to look uncomfortably like a move that was motivated less by a desire to bring justice and redress to the victims than to buy their silence.

Foreign Ministry official Sugiyama’s response to the CEDAW committee on 16 February made the answer to these questions disturbingly plain. Pressed on the comfort women issue, he replied ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’. He added that the notion that comfort women had been forcibly recruited was a misconception based on fabricated testimony by a former Japanese labour recruiter named Yoshida Seiji, and that this misinformation had been disseminated by the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which later retracted the claims.

This statement by Sugiyama is entirely misleading. The Yoshida testimony (which was reported in the early 1990s by almost all the Japanese mainstream media, not just Asahi Shimbun) has been known to be unreliable for more than a decade. And it has had no significant influence on the ‘comfort women’ debate in recent years. More importantly, it is far from the only evidence. The evidence that women were recruited against their will comes from a mass of testimonies from survivors and other eyewitnesses as well as evidence given to war crimes trials and court cases, alongside other historical material.

Australian survivor Jan Ruff-O’Herne, who was marched out of an internment camp and into a military brothel at gunpoint during the war, has never received an apology. Nor have many others forcibly recruited in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

It is time for Japan’s friends and allies, particularly those like Australia who plan to cooperate with Japan in protecting human rights around the region, to ask the hard questions. Will Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet repeat the words of the Kono Declaration loud and clear? Or will they admit that they have abandoned the declaration? They cannot have it both ways. Sugiyama insisted to the CEDAW committee that the Japanese government is not ‘denying history’. Now we need an answer to the follow-up question: which history are they not denying?

EUROPE, A PERFECT STORM OF CRISES? 3/7, 3:00pm. Sponsor: Project for the Study of the 21st Century. Speakers: Sir Michael Leigh, Former Director General for E.U. Enlargement, European Commission; Heather Conley, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau for European and Eurasian Affairs; Simona Kordosova Lightfoot, Campaigns Manager, Future Europe Program, Atlantic Council.

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APP is a Washington research center studying the U.S. policy relationship with Northeast Asia. We provide factual context and informed insight on Asian science, finance, politics, security, history, and public policy.